The inventive concept relates to disk drives. More particularly, the inventive concept relates to a method and apparatus for controlling the height, i.e., the flying height, at which a magnetic head of a disk drive floats above a disk during a read or write operation.
In general, a hard disk drive employs a magnetic head to magnetize a recording surface of a disk or to pick up bits of magnetic data from the recording surface of the disk to thereby write data on the disk or read data from the disk. In this respect, the data is recorded on or read from tracks running in the circumferential direction of the disk, and the data storage capacity of the disk is a function of the bits per inch (BPI), i.e., the density of the data recorded along each track, and the tracks per inch (TPI), i.e., the number of tracks per inch in the radial direction. The data storage capacity of such a disk is being gradually increased, while at the same time the size of the hard disk is being decreased to meet demands for compact disk drives. Especially in the case of such compact disk drives, a very precise mechanism is required for positioning the magnetic head relative to the disk. In particular, a flying height of the magnetic head, namely, the distance between the magnetic head and the disk, must be precise. The manufacturing of the hard disk drive includes a process of implementing the specifications that establish the flying height. However, this process can be difficult to perform and the flying height of the head is often imprecise.